India create Google Earth alternative called Bhuvan

India is developing an alternative to Google Earth in a bid to give more detail about the local landscape and environment.{ad}

The development is being carried out by the National Remote Sensing Center (NRSC) and will be called Bhuvan. It aims to provide new information about the environment such as soil types and the location of ground water through an increased resolution of just 2.5 meters.

An NRSC scientist who decided to remain anonymous commented:

We’ll be putting a lot of thematic information like land use, ground water potential and soil types, which are not available on Google Earth

There is no news on when Bhuvan will be ready for use, but there are already concerns over security of such a system. Google Earth was known to be used in the Mumbai attacks last year and it is thought Bhuvan could form another information and planning resource for future terrorism.

For now the NRSC have just said that masking of important buildings will be considered, but Bhuvan is expected to be a freely available resource accessible via a web browser by anyone.

Matthew’s Opinion
It sounds like the NRSC are starting from scratch with new satellite image data, but at a higher resolution than Google Earth allows. I wonder if this was a decision from the start, or if they approached Google first to see if they could use their system, but modify it?

By doing it themselves they have more control over the age of the data and the detail used. I believe the soil and water data will be specific to India, but what’s to say it won’t be a project picked up worldwide? There is also the possibility that this new data could be transferred back to Google Earth, but just not at the same detail level in the future.

There is always going to be a security threat with project such as this and the only thing that can be done is masking of specific and important areas. Especially with the increased detail on offer Bhuvan will form an excellent resource for those studying the Indian landscape, we just have to hope it is limited to use for good.